Fostering energy-awareness in scientific cloud users

Academic cloud infrastructures are constructed and maintained so they minimally constrain their users. Since they are free and do not limit usage patterns, academics developed such behavior that jeopardizes fair and flexible resource provisioning. For efficiency, related work either explicitly limits user access to resources, or introduces automatic rationing techniques. Surprisingly, the root cause (i.e., the user behavior) is disregarded by these approaches. This paper compares academic cloud user behavior to its commercial equivalent. We deduce, that academics should behave like commercial cloud users to relieve resource provisioning. To encourage this behavior, we propose an architectural extension to academic infrastructure clouds. We evaluate our extension via a simulation using real life academic resource request traces. We show a potential resource usage reduction while maintaining the unlimited nature of academic clouds.